Inside trashing

My battered profession continues to take it's lumps.  The press, the clients, the insurance companies and now it's an inside job.  The Past President of the American Psychological Association, Alan Kazdin, gave an invited lecture in which he said that psychotherapy, as it is practiced today, is inefficient and elitist.  It is slow and works with people one or few at a time, while the mental health problems that are facing this country are huge.  He said that there is a need for new approaches, and that psychologists/therapists should not sit in their offices and wait for people to come to them, they should devise way to get out and treat the problems where they exist.

He's not wrong. He just twenty-eight years late.  I don't know how old he is but he must be younger than I am.  He was probably not riding on his high horse in the 1970s when the community mental health movement was taking hold.  I was working in another city at the time, another New England Mill city much like the one I am in now.  I was running a small Mental Health Center that was funded by state and federal funds, as well as payments from the people we were treating.

We had programs that went into schools, brought new parents together, worked with kids in housing projects, consulted to policemen, had follow-up care for the seriously mentally ill. We had the early formation of alcohol and drug education programs and outreach. We even were dealing with domestic violence and racism.  We were doing lots of cool stuff.

I remember that I really enjoyed working with about twenty-five kids in a concrete building in a not very good part of town.  I would meet them twice a week after school and help them organize activities, or figure out school, or complain about the way they were being treated.  Once, when were organizing a weekend dance,  I didn't want there to be trouble, as that could give the whole program a bad rap with the community.  I asked some of the bigger kids what we should do if the "bad element" showed up and wanted to be disruptive.  They broke out laughing.  They explained that if I was to ask around town for the four names of who was considered the "bad element" I would find out that they were sitting right next to me.

But all that ended quickly in the 80s, with Reagan.  I am sure that what we did would be very quickly labeled as "Socialism" by many in the media today.  Dr Kazdin is not really searching for new, innovative ideas.  Like many, many visionaries, especially in Psychology, he is just recycling old ones.